


But they were made out of thin, invisible steel

by paperdream



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Origin Story, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-13 08:50:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3375299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperdream/pseuds/paperdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Clint brings her in, he and Coulson and everyone else insists on saying she’s been “brought in from the cold.”</p><p>They don’t seem to understand that she wasn't in the cold; the cold was inside her. They’d scooped out everything human and filled her with ice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frith_in_thorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/gifts).



> For the MCU Ladies Fic Exchange 2014, for frith_in_thorns. Not sure this is exactly what you wanted, but I gave it my best shot.   
> This uses what knowledge I have of the comics (very, very little, in this case), so hopefully those elements don't deviate too ridiculously.

            Her whole life has been cold, she thinks later. Little as she remembers of her early life, she does know she was born in Russia. Her earliest vague memory, the only one she has before the Red Room, is of a man in a government uniform tearing her from her father’s arms and out into the cold winter air. She thinks he loved her. She doesn’t remember. Maybe she never knew to begin with.

            What she does remember is being cold.

            She remembers sitting in the snow, wearing only a thin dress, her teeth clattering as she shivered. She remembers plunging into an icy river on an op, one of her first. She didn’t shiver then. They had taught her not to.

            She was cold as Natalia, the little girl being ripped from home and plunged into a nightmare. She was cold when she didn’t have a name, when she was only a red-headed number among 28 others. She was cold as Laura, as Nadia, as Susan and Katherine and Megan. She is cold now, as Natasha.

            Vaguely, she thinks she has always been cold. 


	2. Chapter 2

            When Clint brings her in, he and Coulson and everyone else insists on saying she’s been “brought in from the cold.”

            They don’t seem to understand that she wasn’t in the cold; the cold was inside her. They’d scooped out everything human and filled her with ice.

 

            She does what she has to. She plays their good little soldier, she goes where she’s pointed. Clint takes it upon himself to “introduce her to American culture” and she pretends to learn, to be interested.

            Slowly, she thinks the ice starts to melt and now she’s full of slush, just as inhuman, but much harder to remain upright. She draws back, becomes more insular, avoids Clint and Coulson more and more. She doesn’t know what she is without the ice.

            She doesn’t know if she’s anything anymore.

 

            Slowly, she starts to think of Clint as…not a friend. She doesn’t have those, she can’t. Nevertheless, she’s close to Clint. He’s the only one, besides Coulson, who stays comfortable behind his bland mask of familiarity- she’s built up a reputation at SHIELD, everyone knows to avoid the Black Widow.

            She doesn’t mind the rumors, she tells herself. She never needed anyone before, and if she has to go weak on the inside, she’ll take that and turn it into steel instead. There’s no one there to hold her up, so she’ll have to pull herself up on her won.

 

            Everything comes to a head in Budapest.

            It looked like it would be a normal op, flirt her way in, get the information SHIELD wanted, and fight her way out. Clint would cover her, it should be seamless, in and out like they’d done a thousand times before.

            No one told her the mark had worked in the Red Room. After a glance at her face, he started spewing half-forgotten trigger words. For the first time in years, she woke up in a strange room with no idea how she got there, Clint sitting sentry next to her.

            She drank the water he gave her, accepted his explanation of a hotel room and a successful mission, gave all the appropriate responses and code words. When Clint was finally satisfied that she was in control, she cleaned her weapons with shaking hands and changed into her civvies.

            When Clint ventured out in search of food, she shut herself in the bathroom and curled up in the bathtub.

            For the first time since she was a little girl, she started sobbing, thrashing and shaking against the walls of the tub.

            She was falling apart, she was breaking in two, something inside of her was broken, irrevocably.

            When Clint came back, he started banging on the door, finally breaking it down and wrapping her in his arms and holding her while she cried.

            “It’s alright, Natasha, it’s over now. You aren’t theirs anymore.”


	3. Chapter 3

When she’s been remade and all that’s left inside her is a cold bar of steel that keeps her upright and moving, humanity starts to trickle in. She laughs, she jokes, she starts to enjoy the movies Clint picks out and Phil’s puns. She starts to remember.   
Remembering hurts, like a brain freeze that never goes away. She tries to hide it, but that only lasts until Clint finds her curled up and gasping in an air vent. He holds onto her until she calms down, then takes her down and pulls Coulson out of a meeting.   
Coulson approaches this like he does everything- methodically, calmly, and kindly. He sits there, silent, while she spills her guts and he writes it all down in his strange brand of shorthand. Then, he puts his notes away, guides her to her bunk, and sits there until she falls asleep.   
The next day, he’s back with shadows under his eyes and a thick file of papers, information extrapolated from her fuzzy memories and vague descriptions. She opens it to find pictures of half-remembered faces, the men who designed her, and the teachers who broke her down and rebuilt her from scratch, the girls she grew up with.  
At the edge of her consciousness, Coulson is buzzing about how this, all of this, is her choice, how he won’t interfere if she wants revenge or closure, but please Natasha, register anything with him before she jets off, even if it can’t be put in the official files.   
She mutters a thank you, and leaves. This is something that deserves further thought.  
They trained her to think things through, after all.


	4. Chapter 4

            It takes three days to read through all the files SHIELD has referencing the Red Room. Coulson is nothing if not thorough, so it takes two of those days to find the file that catches her interest.

            She didn’t think she could be surprised anymore, but somehow it had never occurred to her that she might not be the only one to leave the Red Room through a means other than death. The lack of others at SHIELD contributed, but when she finds evidence in the file, it’s like being shot in the gut, and she immediately starts berating herself for being so surprised.

            The records have a rather thin file on Yelena Bolova, a rogue assassin for hire, suspected to be a former Soviet operative. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Small scar above her eyebrow from where Nadia cut her in a training fight when they were twelve.

            The one, fuzzy photograph in the file barely shows the ends of the long scars carving up and down her back from when she was caught sneaking extra food to Natasha- no, she was still Natalia then, wasn’t she?

            She doesn’t keep reading the file. She grabs the small dossier on Yelena and marches down to Coulson’s office to ask for more.

            He can’t give her much, only the last phone number she was known to use for setting up assignments.

            It takes a week for Natasha to work up the nerve to call the number.

            “Is Yelena Bolova there? I’m an… an old friend.”


	5. Chapter 5

            It takes half an hour of arguing in half a dozen languages, but eventually, Natasha and Yelena have a lunch date set up for the next day. Natasha doesn’t mention that she’s closer to Beijing than Albuquerque, and steals a quinjet to make up the distance.

            She’s made her painful emergence into her future. Maybe she can help her sister do the same.

            Maybe SHIELD was right about “coming in from the cold”.


End file.
